I Just Broke Down

I just broke down. I bought a ticket to Opening Day on Stub Hub. I wasn’t planning to do this. I didn’t want to do this. I did it. It’s a really lousy seat. Upper Deck Reserved. Row Q. Makes me think of Avenue Q (you know, “it sucks to be me.”) Seventy five bucks. How did it happen?

Well, I was checking to see if there were any new comments on my blog. There was a new comment by Shelley on the post “Your Season Has Come.” Shelley, like hundreds of thousands of us, is an outraged fan who has gone to opening days in the past and lost the lottery and has been scrounging around trying to get a ticket ever since. She says she wasn’t going to spend $200 for a ticket on StubHub. She even sent me an e-mail asking if I knew of any way she could get a ticket. This is a loyal fan. I couldn’t help her. I didn’t even have a ticket myself.

So I was all prepared to write a post about how the real fan’s Opening Day would be the second game of the season on Wednesday, April 11. I already had tickets for that game, for myself and my daughter. Reasonably priced good seats, Loge Reserved, thirty bucks each. They were no problem to get. If the lottery was going to freeze out the Mets fans who had filled the stands for Opening Days in the past, then we could make our own Opening Day, couldn’t we? The poor person’s opening day. The Opening Day for those of us whose seats for the really big games were left out of the plans for CitiField.

I was at Opening Day in 1983 when Seaver came back, when they drove him in from the outfield to the “Welcome Back Kotter” song. Any fan that can show up for Opening Day in 1983 after the 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1982 Mets seasons, who can stay loyal to a franchise that gives Tom Seaver away TWICE, deserves Opening Day tickets. He or she deserves sainthood. But, he says, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, he or she doesn’t even get consideration when they design the little, new, lucrative stadium.

I should have stuck with my principles, and with my resentment. I should have been happy to go to the second game of the season and call it whatever I wanted to. But before I put up a post to try to rally other Mets fans to think the same way, I decided to check out StubHub to see what Opening Day tickets were actually selling for. I’d never been to StubHub before. The tickets were expensive. All of them over $100. But there was one forlorn little ticket for $75 way the hell up in the Upper Deck, probably being sold by someone who simply had an extra ticket. I bit my lip. I cursed the way they had us over a barrel. I felt the depths and the degradation of my total humiliation.